Slashdot Mirror
An Open Source Pitfall? Mozilla Labs Closed, Quietly
mikejuk writes with this excerpt: When Google Labs closed there was an outcry. How could an organization just pull the rug from under so many projects? At least Google announced what it was doing. Mozilla, it seems since there is no official record, just quietly tiptoes away — leaving the lights on since the Mozilla Labs Website is still accessible. It is accessible but when you start to explore the website you notice it is moribund with the last blog post being December 2013 with the penultimate one being September 2013. The fact that it is gone is confirmed by recent blog posts and by the redeployment of the people who used to run it. The projects that survived have been moved to their own websites. It isn't clear what has happened to the Hatchery -the incubator that invited new ideas from all and sundry. One of the big advantages of open source is the ease with which a project can be started. One of the big disadvantages of open source is the ease with which projects can be allowed to die — often without any clear cut time of death. It seems Mozilla applies this to groups and initiatives as much as projects. This isn't good. The same is true at companies that aren't open source centric, though, too, isn't it?
How can open source software die? the source is there! Anyone interested in the software has had ample time to get the source. All mozilla or google or any other service is doing is providing some hosting for the git repository. clone it and save it if you care that much about the software. Wringing your hands that and crying all is lost just says you are doing open source wrong.
There was an outcry when Google Labs closed because people actually used stuff that came from there. Mozilla Labs, on the other hand...
#DeleteChrome
Seems to be the way things work with the Mozilla crew. Look at the "progress" of the Thunderbird project. For over a decade people have been complaining about its inability to accurately render html, yet that problem still exists in the software today. No one wants to work on the un-sexy nuts and bolts stuff; everybody wants to be the guy who wrote the flashy new UI. Kinda difficult to do anything about it when you can't fire someone and hire a decent replacement.
And here I was expecting an Open Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitfall!. How disappointing.
Its lost the browser initiative to google. I can't imagine it will still be around in its current form in a decade.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
Really? In a recession companies cut down on pet projects?
I'm taken aback, really!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And that doesn't happen with closed source projects? Sure it does, you just don't hear about it when some PHB slowly takes a group of developers and has them put everything on the back burner for some pet project. Then years pass, the old project isn't officially dead, but nothing has gotten done. On and off new business requirements are analyzed, and eventually a mysterious mandate from far higher up comes down to re-write everything in "HTML5" or whatever the current buzzword is.
Is that because closed source enterprises never get shut down?
Gee, if it is Open Source, you can even branch it and continue on your own, if you feel like... now, with closed sources....
In my professional career, several projects I have worked on have been canceled despite a good state - not behind schedule nor over budget, or even ahead of schedule and/or under budget. The reasons were usually variations from "marketing has decided to change direction" to "after management re-org, the new managers decided the risks were too high". The latter happened to one project despite us having 5 fully and correctly operating prototypes, and having invested 3 person-years of effort and over half a million US dollars in development tools and licensing of third party libraries. Another project was canceled because the primary stakeholder lost interest despite the first two phases being highly successful.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
Depends on the project. Many BSD and Linux nuts and bolts get fixed by very qualified and talented people. For some reason, Mozilla projects seem to relish letting the most aggravating bugs languish for decades. Not always because of a lack of patches or reviewers, but because of giant egos coupled with Napoleon complexes.
When Opera decided to become a cheap Chrome clone, the Mozilla crew lost its source for ideas.
labs.mozilla.org has been dead for a while now.
the last blog post being December 2013 with the penultimate one being September 2013.
"Penultimate" means "second to last." The submitter used the word correctly. You are a moron.
Or to translate that sentence in a form you can understand: Your a moran.
This has nothing to do with open source at all. An organization closed down a unit, and got rid of some projects. That happens pretty much every day in the private sector and in the closed source world. What makes open source special in this regard. Do you expect them to keep supporting things forever even when the organization doesn't want to anymore?
The only difference is that with open source, someone could take that code and keep working on it, if they wanted to. That's it. The rest of this has nothing to do with open source at all and is just a flagrant attempt at drumming up controversy by asking a bullshit question in the headline.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
For Pete's sake, read and comprehend before being incorrectly righteously indignant!
September 2013 comes before December 2013 by any reasonable reckoning. If the last post on the blog was December 2013 and the one from September 2013 is referred to as the penultimate post it's a fairly safe assumption that the author is correctly stating that the September 2013 post was the second to last post made.
It's a good thing he used it to mean second to last, then!
The jewel of open source software is the source code (sic). Have the repository managers (Google, Mozilla, et al) moved the sources to a neutral 3rd party such as github, SourceForge, et al? If not, then then have consumately violated their unspoken pact with the community. If so, then where did it go? I'm sure other open source projects can benefit by studying, or adopting some of that code base.
I like it, especially the Portable version, but one most such software sorta works there is no further interest in refining it.
Mozilla fell long ago to artists who just want to fuck up the UI because they think change is progress.
I'll still use Thunderbird, but I don't need html rendering to read my email.
Mozilla has long since been Google-fied. Even the Firefox browser has been Chrome-ified (yes Australis theme, I am referring to you).
Mozilla is now making similar corporate decisions as Google. Color me surprised... NOT.
It was the C++ re-write that screwed Mozilla/Netscape. C++ is the worst language that ever had widespread adoption as far as productivity.
They announced that they killed Thunderbird too several months after the fact. It was months and months after the latest update, suddenly they're like "Oh yeah, that? We're done with that." Outlook sucks, Windows Live mail sucks, Incredemail is a disease, and Eudora is dead as well. There are a grand total of zero good e-mail programs out there now. What were they thinking?
Actually, they announced what they were thinking. They're focusing on making new versions of Firefox every single month for no reason and causing massive crash glitches, incompatibilities with webpages, and an all out war with Flash player as well as a go-nowhere phone OS project. Great choice! But what would you expect from a company that gets over 90% of its money from Google, who makes a competing product.
To be clear, this Mozilla Labs thing does not seem to be related to their big products and research projects, i.e. firefox, firefox os, rust, servo. Mozilla labs is some sort of project incubator for people to work on webby applications.
So it closed last year, but you only just noticed and posted an article? It doesn't seem like it's going to be missed very much, if the corpse can decompose and start to smell before someone sends the police to check on aunt Mozlabs.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Mozilla, in my opionion, have made some unsound choice of late. I really find no compelling reason to keep using their browser or other products. I'm already moving over to Midori as a browser, since it's almost 100% stable under Debian, and has adblock and referrer blocing. The rest I can do myself with the OS or a software proxy. FF has become the kitchen sink in my estimation. When projects do more than one or two things, their focus is lost.
It's not often you get these gems from someone not posting as AC. You should make a game of it.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
So when was the antepenultimate blog post???
Thunderbird is an effectively dead project. Mozilla said, several years ago, shut the project down and said that it will only receive security fixes and nothing more.
after a link, for knuckledicks like you.
Thunderbird is getting all the core features and improvements that Firefox gets, because they share the same core.
It's on par with using the Firefox Extended Support Release, without the retarded UI changes.
Killing most projects early is considered a good thing in some circles because it weeds out the garbage and makes more resources available to the more worthwhile projects.
Often you can tell how good a company is at managing R&D by how quickly it kills bad projects.
When I was working in R&D portfolio management we found that a bunch of small projects was much less likely to return something worthwhile than a more limited number of big projects.
It really boiled down to the idea that there is a non-linear relationship between resources devoted to a project and the likelihood of success.
"... They just get FASTER!!!"
APK
P.S.=> Meaning someone comes along & "hotrods" them, which *IS* a nice part of "Open SORES" you're alluding to... apk
You may find this interesting!
Maybe it's just me, but I can never see the goat in those pictures.
Have you looked at most of the Debian packages, for example? 75% of them are crap for the one reason that developers get a head of steam, no pun intended, write 70% of what would be a complete project and lose interest, and what is left off is the most important part, decent docs. There ARE good projects with decent docs in Debian, but most are poorly documented. That is because developers do the worst job of writing in any clear language what their packages do. So, open source dies not because source goes away, but because not enough effort was spent on explaining what the software does or how it was intended to be used, and so it dies because no one wants to invest the effort needed to figure it out. Very few people can read others' source and intelligently figure out what the code does, and if they can they usually can't string together words in a spoken language to describe it. I think that poor linguistic expression is revealed in another way that obstructs usage in a big way. This is feature bloat, software that attempts to do everything and ends up doing nothing very well because it is too poorly designed to be used by human beings. Open source repositories like Debian are full of this kind of stuff. It isn't that they are not powerful, it is that they are not useful.
Look at the package recordmydesktop and try to make sense of its documentation. Its man page is very complex and its controls are low-level, requiring use of signal.h interrupts. not something you want a novice to have to deal with. It is as though some guy wrote it as an afternoon hack of low-level tools and didn't bother to learn enough GTK to write a few buttons for the GUI it comes with. Far worse than that is trying to figure out the interactions with the system.
Object Oriented Development is not a solution to this problem because refactoring further obscures user logic. Good OOD is not the same as clear user logic, in fact they often work against one another. With OOD documentation is even more important because of this. So FOSS projects really die because the documentation does not support their use so that others can come along and use them without direct community help.
I believe R&D is better off with Crowd Source
Casteism
Mozilla stopped caring about ideas from others a long time ago. For years Mozilla only exists to feed the egos of the top developers. They are no longer listening to user input and keep alienating its user base with every version of any of their products. Abandoning their own incubator in this way really fits the picture. It would have only generated ideas that the top devs at Mozilla resoundingly rejected because it was 'not invented here'. They get really aggressive if you pitch an idea to them, almost as if you insulted their next of kin and burned their house down. The Mozillas would be much better served if they'd shed their unlimited arrogance and return back to the roots making software aimed at satisfying user needs.